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Searcheeze: A collaborative alternative to Evernote

Searcheeze is a new search curation tool that has just come out of private beta. Co-founded by Stefano Passatadori and Flavio Gambardella, the Italy-based startup was originally unveiled a couple of years ago as Ibrii.

With two years worth of feedback under their belts, the co-founders took Ibrii and reformatted it to create Searcheeze, a service which made it as a finalist in European Demo Day in San Franciso this past July.

Searcheeze allows you to collect images, text and video from around the web, and save them to an online account, much like Evernote does. The difference between Evernote and Searcheeze is the fact that the latter is focused on giving users a collaborative experience when it comes to searching for and saving content from the web.

After signing up for a free account you can begin to create new topics. You have the choice of making these topics public or private, as well as inviting other users to contribute. Invitations can be sent via email or Facebook.

To actually populate your topic, you can install the handy bookmarklet which allows you to drag text, images, audio clips and video into the Searcheeze sidebar.

You can also add text of your own through the web interface, as well as add captions to each item you save.

Just as you can drag and drop items into the Searcheeze sidebar, you can also drag and drop them within the sidebar to rearrange their order, as well as in the web interface.

The final page, which you can share publicly or keep private will feature all of your shared items in a sleek, clean grid, which is very easy to read.

Each text item will have it’s own box, accompanied by the link where the text came from and the date it was saved. Videos are each displayed in their own box on the page. In our experience YouTube videos didn’t play nice with Searcheeze, but we had no trouble adding Vimeo videos to our collection.

All photos are displayed in a gallery, which opens up in a lightbox.

Once you’re ready to share your collection to the world you can publish it on Searcheeze and, if you’ve connected your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and WordPress accounts, you can autopost the collections to these services with the click of a button.

So why would you use a tool like Searcheeze over Evernote? While Evernote allows you to publicly share your notes, you can only allow others to modify content if you are a premium user. Searcheeze gives you this feature for free. And as far as aesthetics are concerned, Searcheeze definitely sprints ahead of Evernote, as the final product looks far better.

Needless to say Evernote’s overall features are far more robust than Searcheeze, but the service addresses one issue in particular – making it easy for a team to contribute to any given topic.

Comparisons to Evernote aside, Searcheeze is an ideal tool for teams working on a project and need to be able to share information from around the web in a quick and easy way. For private users, it can easily be used as an online scrapbook of sorts, or online bookmarking alternative, allowing you to save clippings from all over the web, in neat organized topics.

If you want to find out more about Searcheeze, check out the video below: